"He’s alternately a teddy bear and a grizzly bear," is the way Quentin Tarantino once described to me actor Lawrence Tierney, whose career was resuscitated when he was cast as Reservoir Dogs’ bald-pated gang mastermind, Joe Cabot. Tierney, who died last month at 82, was a Tarantino favorite because of his gruff, homicidal performances in such "B" noirs as Dillinger (1945) and Born To Kill (1947), and he was the blackguard who derailed the circus train in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). He proved a brawling, violent, drunken presence off screen also. In 1955, a newspaper reported that he’d been arrested more times than Dillinger. In 1973, he was stabbed in a barroom fight. "Do you remember his 1947 film The Devil Thumbs a Ride?", Tarantino asked. "That could almost be entitled The Lawrence Tierney Story."

Back in the mid ’80s, I interviewed Tierney in a dank motel room on the edge of Provincetown, where he was appearing in Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance. "In the old days, I drank too much and got into trouble. Now I don’t drink alcohol," he declared, proving it by knocking back glasses of milk. A grim, incommunicative man, he showed flashes of kindness. "Do you want a cookie?" he kept asking, just like the Mafia don in Prizzi’s Honor.

Tierney’s career sank so low in the 1970s that he worked as a hack driving a horse and buggy in Central Park. He blamed Hollywood gossiper Hedda Hopper for sabotaging his career. "She would print terrible lies, completely manufactured. She was a twisted tyrant. I should have sued Hedda." Things were better with Tough Guys. "They had me read for the role, and Norman is pretty happy with it. Norman knows what he wants, and we get along. And Tough Guys is an interesting, high-grade mystery." You could think of his character, Dougy Madden, as the moral center of Mailer’s askew story. No matter that he helped his messed-up son (Ryan O’Neal) escape a trumped-up murder charge by dumping the victims’ heads into the Atlantic. Tierney disagreed with my analysis. "I don’t know that it’s normal to throw women’s heads into the ocean. If that’s normal, we’re all in deep trouble."

ONE OF THE FEW NO-SHOWS among the cast and crew for the recent Coolidge Corner screening of The Strangler’s Wife was executive producer Roger Corman, who had financed part of the Boston shoot in exchange for the rights to the film. Last week, I caught up with Corman, who is LA-based, at the Mar del Plata Film Festival, on the coast of Argentina. He was being paid homage for his half-century of making exploitation films (The Little Shop of Horrors, The Masque of the Red Death, etc.) and discovering directorial talents (Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, etc.).

Corman was pleased to hear that the Coolidge showing had attracted an audience of 500. Would that translate into purchases of the movie? Made by Boston’s Cityscape Films, The Strangler’s Wife is one of a series of extremely low-budget genre movies (approximately $100,000 per film) that his company, New World, is farming to out-of-house producers. "We’ve found that the optimal number for distribution is 24 films a year, two a month, but we can’t make that many ourselves. We find partners. We approve the basic lines of the scripts, and we put in money. It’s not much of a gamble. We can make our money back, and there’s a possibility with a good film to make a lot of money. Everyone knows what will succeed: thrillers, action pictures. Indies are overloading on this type of film."

Is the excitement gone now with the ease of determining what will be profitable? "We were more socially conscious, more original, in the ’60s. Our own company is guilty to a certain degree of falling into a trap of making films where you can predict their sales. You want to break out of the formula occasionally."

Any projects we should look for? Well, he’s making a film about the Enron scandal in which "someone connected with Enron is murdered to keep him quiet." And he smiled about Mary McCloud Can Fly, "our anti–Harry Potter film. A little girl has magical powers, including the ability to fly. There’s a vague social statement here in that she goes to a school run by the government that is the exact opposite of Harry Potter’s: the object is to take away these powers, to make children into conformists."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com